The Center for
City Building Education™ was founded by Doreen
Nelson over 30 years ago to unlock and speed-up the transformational
skills associated with creative thinking. While promoting the use
of the built environment as a vehicle for teaching, students learn
how to solve problems and, more importantly, that all the facts learned
can be used in real life.
The mission is
to improve teaching skills, to raise the standards in academic performance
in reading, math, language, science and cognitive skills with technology
as a tool to manipulate those subjects. Aimed at elementary and secondary
students project-based activities merge the practical with the theoretical.
|
|
Design
as a Catalyst for Learning
Documents 30 years of K-12 educational programs funded by the
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Showcases City Building
Education, the first NEA funded program in 1971 and explains
the values of methods used in this website. Published by the
Association for
Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) in 1997 and
ditrubuted to 20,000 school administrators as part of their
membership,
|
City Building
Education™ grew out of Doreen Nelson's fourteen years of experience
as a teacher in the Los Angeles City schools and became the first
federally funded architect-in-schools project in the nation. It is
founded on successful pedagogical principles where students -- of
any age --create physical three-dimensional learning projects that
seek resolution rather than replication. All of the learning is placed
into a simulated context and played out on a giant "game board" used
for unifying the curriculum. While building a city, a village, a business
, a continent or a civilization, students design the roles of individuals,
objects and organizations as they learn how everything operates together
to make up a community. They gain practice with making choices and
changes; starting with something known and familiar then turning it
into something original that reflects their own vision.
Raising the standards.
Examples of typical assessment results include a middle school where
65% of the City Building Education sixth grade students were admitted
into higher level math courses for the next year as opposed to 41%
of students in all other sixth grade classrooms. A two year study
of low income, limited English speaking Hispanic third graders shows
reading, math and language scores doubled, and in some cases tripled,
as compared to control classrooms. (See Results)
The City Building
Education method known as Backward Thinking™ reverses the usual
teaching process. It is the natural way that people resolve dilemmas,
change things and continuously arrange and rearrange reality to control
time and space. The learner is asked to start with invention - regardless
of the subject or the task. When designing the places for people to
live, work and shop in the city, they devise a plan. When designing
jobs for a mayor or studying environmental issues, they invent a job
description or a way to get rid of garbage. Once engaged, they analyze
the invention then research what exist.
